Rewired: A Handmade Book

Well. I was going to launch into an explanation of how I practice what I preach by creating a piece of “Slow Art,” but I see from a search of my blog that I’ve never actually written a post specifically about Slow Art. Apparently that’s a post that still needs to be written. Ahem.

So, anyway, I decided earlier this year (or was it late last year?) to create a handmade book that wasn’t blank. I wanted to fill the pages, but wasn’t sure with what. Having no readily available ideas, I decided to play with collage and let the images from a magazine inspire me. I chose Wired magazine, the entire year’s worth of 2011 issues, as my palette. This magazine, the only one I subscribe to and read cover-to-cover, is always visually appealing and I thought it’d be a great one to remix. “Rewired” seemed to be a good title for my experiment and I used light bulbs and a couple of light switches as a continuous visual theme throughout.

I knew I was also going to use words in the book, but wanted to pull those from the magazine as well. Clive Thompson’s column in the magazine is my favorite feature because he’s always twisting ideas in new ways, so I decided that I’d limit myself to text primarily from his column. I wasn’t completely successful in this, but all of the small text you see in the images below are from Clive’s column and the larger text is from all over.

I built these pages in pairs, so the pages facing each other have either a visual or a contextual relationship to each other. There is an inner logic to the entire book, although likely I’m the only one who knows what that is. Part of creating a book like this is to allow the reader/viewer to make up her own story, so take from it what you will.

The other challenge I set for myself in creating this book is that I had to do it slowly – it had to be Slow Art. I didn’t want to rush through this just to create something. This was at least 4 months in the making. (Why did it feel longer?)

Without further adieu … “Rewired.” (Please forgive the crappiness of the photos. Our camera is not good at adjusting the focus for items on different planes or for close-up text.)

Rewired – Front cover, Kerzap 2011

Rewired – Interior of cover – Remixed by Mary Warner

Rewired – Page 1, Slow — Page 2, Decode Reality

Rewired – Page 3, The craptacular design! It’s called steganography. — Page 4, Hiding one message inside free, public data produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Rewired – Page 5, Power & Brownies: A quick impression of What It All Means. — Page 6, Conspiracy theories will the miss most about kittens: Epic Aliens.

As Above, Not So Below

Teacup Art Show

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